The concatenation of pictures and videos in real time has become a standard method of communication in individual and large group settings. Recent advancements in the organization of content in real time (“stories”) have allowed individuals and groups to provide in-the-moment communication to other persons or groups. The result of this new style of communication is that applications or “apps” that concatenate pictures and videos in real time are becoming a preferred method of communication among individuals and groups. In addition to individuals and groups communicating to other individuals and groups, this new form of communication has become a favorite of businesses looking to advertise and market to potential customers.
As this form of communication continues to grow, a need is arising for a system to determine the order of present and future postings in these real-time communications. Several challenges have impeded such a process in the current art.
One such challenge is the quantity of content posted to a cloud-based storage location, such as servers. At the usage rates currently present in the market, users and groups on average generate one to four posts in any given ninety second period. When there is a large influx of posts, the servers require additional time to receive and broadcast the communication to the desired receiver.
For example, if user posts a five second video to a story, in the current art, there is nothing prohibiting the same user from posting another video immediately afterwards. In this same example, the app being used by the user will send the consecutive post to a server which will store and load each post individually for the party on the receiving end. In the same example, the party on the receiving end may be delayed while he or she waits for the server to prepare the back-to-back videos being communicated. This time lag limits the capabilities of this new form of communication, is inconvenient, and leads to a poor user experience.
To minimize this impact to users, these applications are forced to limit the number of devices that can post to a single story. In the current art, there is a maximum of the number of users that can communicate regarding a single story. This limitation from the application to its user allows the application to mitigate the risk of multiple users submitting posts, making the lag time in the communication minimal. In the present art, if it is desired that a single story communicate across a substantial number of users, the user is forced to choose an alternative method of communication.
Another challenge is the quality of the content posted to the server. Since there is no limit to the amount of posts that a user may post in a given period of time, the application's servers may ultimately store a large amount of irrelevant content in order to maintain the story's communication. To use the same example from above, if the user's first post was a five second video of the long line to get on a roller coaster at Disney World, the user may follow up with a video of the same line, but zoomed in more. In this example, the user utilized two individual posts to communicate the same message. When situations like this occur, it is very common for the individual on the receiving end of the story to skip to the next post to avoid watching the duplicated message. This common act by the receiving user makes this method of communication inefficient when scaled for mass usage.
To minimize this inefficiency, these applications may intervene with a manual review process to allow the content from multiple users to be included in a single story. In the present day, there are unique circumstances in which an application will hire a staff to review user-posted content from individual stories and manually copy the content to a story for all application users to review. Continuing the previous example, if it is New Year's Eve, the application may hire a staff to capture the best “Walt Disney World Fireworks.” In addition to posting about the long lines at the Disney World roller coaster in his story, the previous user may have also captured an incredible, picturesque moment of the fireworks display put on by Disney at midnight. In order for that post to be included in the application-generated “Walt Disney World Fireworks” story, a hired staff member from the application must sift through all user-submitted videos of the fireworks and select the timeline of posts that best capture the fireworks, based upon the staff member's creative discretion. Since this is a subjective selection process, the story building takes more time and does not guarantee that a user's submission will ever be selected for the story.
The present disclosure reveals a method for streamlining the process for multiple user accounts to contribute content to a single story on a mass scale.